I use a MacBook Pro for my day-to-day operations here at CB1, INC. I’m a huge believer that a development environment should mimic the production environment, so I find myself running a couple virtual machines in VMware Fusion.

The following guide is a reference for myself as well as possibly a helpful resource for setting up your own Linux development environment. Here’s an checklist of the tasks to perform and software to install:

nginx

nginx is web server that is really fast. I use nginx as my primary development web server unless I’m running a web app that only works with Apache. You can choose to install nginx from package, but I like to live life on the bleeding edge, so I’ll be building nginx from source. To install nginx, we need to download the source, compile it, install it, and configure it.

You’ll need to add the Android SDK path near the top of your ~/.bash_profileor~/.bashrc:

export PATH=${PATH}:/usr/local/android-sdk-linux_x86/tools

To manage your Android SDK packages and virtual devices, you’ll need to run the android app:

user@ubuntu:~# android

First go to Available Packages and download version 1.6and2.2 Android SDK packages. You can also choose to download the documentation, samples, and Google APIs.

Downloading the package may take several minutes. You don’t have to create a virtual device right now if you are planning on installing Appcelerator’s Titanium platform. You can exit the Android app when you’re done.

Desktop Apps

If you’re running Ubuntu Desktop, there are a couple handy apps I install. The first is Google Chrome and can be directly downloaded from the Google Chrome download page.

I find KCachegrind and GHex to be useful:

user@ubuntu:~# sudo apt-get install kcachegrind ghex

Appcelerator Titanium

Titanium is an awesome platform for developing desktop applications for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows as well as mobile apps for iPhone and Android. We use Titanium Developer to create Titanium projects. Begin by downloading the 64-bit version of Titanium:

There’s also a 32-bit version available at http://www.appcelerator.com/download-linux32.

Next we unpack Titanium Developer and move it to a safe place:

user@ubuntu:~# tar xzf titanium.tgz
user@ubuntu:~# rm titanium.tgz

Next you need to run the installer by double-clicking the Titanium Developer executable. Run the executable and then click the Install button. You can try installing to /opt/titanium, but you might need root privileges.

Next, there are a few issues with outdated libraries, so we simply delete them:

Great tutorial here! I agree with the impact of a development atmosphere to the production environment. I should also check your post about Apache 2.2 because I have to run SSL. I am so interested in your kind of topics so expect me to be following your next posts. Awesome job!